Trivia: Of English, French and Irish descent.At six months old, joined his parents for the first time onstage.Attended business college and worked in an appliance corporation.Developed makeup skills which he learned from his father.Started working in films in 1930 after his father's death.In 1935, changed his stage name to Lon Chaney Jr.Played classic movie monsters like a wolf man, Frankenstein's Monster, a mummy and a vampire (Dracula's son).

Trivia: In a kinder world, vivacious film actress Louise Allbritton would have inherited the "screwball comedy" mantle vacated by the late Carole Lombard. Alas, Louise went straight from Pasadena Playhouse to the "B" mills of Universal Pictures, a studio notorious for its mishandling of unique talents. Her best starring assignment during her Universal years was the whimsical heroine in the captivating comedy San Diego I Love You (1945). By 1948, however, Louise was mired in "other woman" and secondary roles; she is quite good in this capacity in Universal's The Egg and I (1947), but the film's best lines and bits of business went to stars Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. Louise Allbritton retired from films in 1949, spending the rest of her life traversing the globe in the company of her husband, peripatetic CBS news correspondent Charles Collingwood.

Trivia: Born John Paige, this versatile leading man of many '40s B-movies and musicals attended West Point before dropping out to work as a radio singer and announcer. In 1931 he began appearing in film shorts, billed as David Carlyle. In the mid '30s he began appearing in features, changing his name to Robert Paige in 1938; by the early '40s he was a busy leading man, appearing in every genre of film. He was onscreen infrequently after 1949, but did much work on TV; besides acting in TV productions (he was a regular on the series Run Buddy Run), he also worked as a quiz-show host and Los Angeles newscaster. He finished his career as a public relations executive in Hollywood.

Trivia: After several years' worth of stage and film appearances in England, actress Evelyn Ankers came to Broadway in 1940 to appear in Ladies in Retirement. Besieged by offers from Hollywood, Evelyn chose to work at 20th Century-Fox, but production delays in her first American film led to her signing a contract with Universal Pictures. Despite her British upbringing, Evelyn was cast as the all-American heroine in her premiere Hollywood film, Abbott and Costello's Hold That Ghost (1941). With her co-starring stint in The Wolf Man (1941), Evelyn began her tenure as Universal's resident horror heroine, possessed of a blood-curdling scream. She also appeared in two Sherlock Holmes films, playing a villainess with a penchant for disguise in the second Holmes effort The Pearl of Death (1944). During the war years, the multilingual Ms. Ankers (who was born in Chile to British parents) starred in a radio program in Argentina. After her film career petered out, Evelyn appeared on several TV shows, most notably co-starring with Buster Keaton and Joe E. Brown in "The Silent Partner," a 1955 episode of Screen Director's Playhouse. Retired since the mid-1960s, Evelyn Ankers spent her last decades with her husband, actor and Lutheran lay minister Richard Denning, in their lavish home in Hawaii.

Trivia: American actor/playwright Frank Craven enjoyed a long stage career as both performer and writer. As an actor, he specialized in wry middle-aged small-town types. As a writer, he favored domestic comedies, usually centered around the tribulations of "normal" family life. Craven was so firmly locked into his particular style that he felt lost doing anything else. For several years during the silent film era, Craven had begged Harold Lloyd to allow him to sit in on the "gag sessions" for Lloyd's films, in order to contribute comedy ideas; after a particularly harrowing session with Lloyd's writers, who tossed gag ideas about at the tops of their voices, Craven admitted that slapstick wasn't his brand of humor and returned to the stage. Craven made his film bow in the 1928 "ethnic melting pot" drama We Americans, but when he was finally brought to Hollywood under contract to Fox in 1932, it was as a writer. One of Craven's best-known screenplays was for the Laurel and Hardy vehicle Sons of the Desert (1933), one of the comedy team's few feature films with a solid plot structure. Concentrating mainly on performing for most of his film career, Craven returned to Broadway in 1939 to play the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning Our Town. The actor was called upon to repeat the role in the 1940 film version, and thereafter most of his film roles were variations of the Stage Manager, complete with his ubiquitous pipe. Craven died in 1945 at age 70, shortly after completing his role in Colonel Effingham's Raid (1945).

Trivia: Born in Hungary, actor J. Edward Bromberg moved with his family to the US while still an infant. Bromberg was certain from an early age that he would pursue an acting career, taking several odd jobs (silk salesman, candy maker, laundry worker) to finance his training. He studied with the Moscow Art Theatre, then made his American stage bow at age 23 at the Greenwich Village Playhouse. The corpulent Bromberg conveyed a perpetual air of ulcerated, middle-aged tension, allowing him to play characters much older than himself. He worked extensively with the Theatre Guild, coming to Hollywood's attention for his work in the 1934 Pulitzer Prize winning play Men in White. With 1936's Under Two Flags, Bromberg began his long association with 20th Century-Fox, playing a vast array of foreign villains, blustering buffoons and the occasional gentle philosopher. He made a triumphant return to Broadway in 1948 as a Louis Mayer-like movie mogul in Clifford Odets' The Big Knife, but the euphoria would not last. Accused of being a Communist sympathizer, Bromberg was blacklisted from Hollywood and forced to seek work in England. Though only 47 when he fled the country, Bromberg looked twenty years older due to the strain of withstanding the accusations of the witchhunters. J. Edward Bromberg died in London in 1951, at age 48; the reason given was "natural causes," since a broken heart is not officially regarded as a fatal condition.

Trivia: Raspy-voiced, distinguished-looking actor Samuel S. Hinds was born into a wealthy Brooklyn family. Well-educated at such institutions as Philips Academy and Harvard, Hinds became a New York lawyer. He moved to California in the 1920s, where he developed an interest in theatre and became one of the founders of the Pasadena Playhouse. A full-time actor by the early 1930s, Hinds entered films in 1932. Of his nearly 150 screen appearances, several stand out, notably his portrayal of Bela Lugosi's torture victim in The Raven (1935), the dying John Vincey in She (1935), the crooked political boss in Destry Rides Again (1939) and the doctor father of Lew Ayres in MGM's Dr. Kildare series. He frequently co-starred in the films of James Stewart, playing Stewart's eccentric future father-in-law in You Can't Take It With You (1938) and the actor's banker dad in the holiday perennial It's a Wonderful Life (1946). One of Samuel S. Hinds' final film roles was an uncredited supporting part in the 1948 James Stewart vehicle Call Northside 777.

Trivia: Adeline Reynolds launched her acting career on-stage at age 70, two years after she graduated from college. Nine years later, in the early '40s, she debuted in films and became the oldest thespian in films during the '50s.

Trivia: Actress Etta McDaniel made her stage debut along with her seven siblings as a member of H. M. Johnson's Mighty Modern Minstrels, a Denver-based musical troupe. In the late 1920s, McDaniel and her older brother Sam headed to Hollywood, where both found steady work in bit parts. In keeping with Hollywood's racial attitudes of the 1930s and 1940s, she was confined to the stereotypical roles usually assigned black actresses of the era: housekeepers, maids, mammies and African natives. Unlike her younger sister Hattie McDaniel, who eventually attained co-star billing and an Academy Award (for Gone with the Wind), Etta McDaniel spent her entire Hollywood career in minor roles.

Trivia: Actor and director George Irving gained fame on both the Broadway stage and in feature films. Before launching his professional career, Iriving graduated from New York's City College and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He then went on to play the leads in numerous Broadway shows before breaking into film in 1913, where he played many different character roles.

Trivia: Born in Colorado and raised in Oregon, actor Walter Sande was a music student from age six. He dropped out of college to organize his own band, then for many years served as musical director for the West Coast Fox Theater chain. In 1937, Sande entered films with a small role in Goldwyn Follies (1938). He fluctuated thereafter between bits in films like Citizen Kane (1941), in which he played one of the many reporters, and supporting roles in films like To Have and Have Not (1944), in which he portrayed the defaulting customer who is punched out by a boat-renting Humphrey Bogart. On television, Walter Sande played Horatio Bullwinkle on Tugboat Annie (1958) and Papa Holstrum on The Farmer's Daughter (1963-1966).

Trivia: The quintessential B-movie lawman, granite-faced, mustachioed Jack Rockwell began turning up in low-budget oaters in the late 1920s and went on to amass an impressive array of film credits that included 225 Westerns and two dozen serials, working mostly for Republic Pictures and Columbia although he was never contracted by either. The Jack Rockwell that most fans remember is a stolid, unsmiling sheriff or marshal but he could also pop up as ranchers, homesteaders, stage drivers, and the occasional henchman, always recognizable even if unbilled and awarded only a couple of words of dialogue. Born John Trowbridge, Rockwell was the brother of another busy Hollywood supporting player, Charles Trowbridge (1982-1967).

Trivia: The older brother of actresses Etta and Hattie McDaniel, Sam McDaniel began his stage career as a clog dancer with a Denver minstrel show. Later on, he co-starred with his brother Otis in another minstrel troupe, this one managed by his father Henry. Sam and his sister Etta moved to Hollywood during the talkie revolution, securing the sort of bit roles usually reserved for black actors at that time. He earned his professional nickname "Deacon" when he appeared as the "Doleful Deacon" on The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour, a Los Angeles radio program. During this period, Sam encouraged his sister Hattie to come westward and give Hollywood a try; he even arranged Hattie's first radio and nightclub singing jobs. McDaniel continued playing minor movie roles doormen, porters, butlers, janitors while Hattie ascended to stardom, and an Academy Award, as "Mammy" in Gone with the Wind (1939). During the 1950s, McDaniel played a recurring role on TV's Amos 'N' Andy Show.

Trivia: African American actor Charles Moore was sometimes billed as Charles R. Moore. In films from 1929, Moore played a variety of supporting roles and was evidently a favorite of writer/director Preston Sturges, as he appeared in four of Sturges' films, delivering one of the funniest single lines in 1941's The Palm Beach Story (to repeat the line out of context would kill the joke). Unfortunately, Charles Moore's skills as a dancer seldom got a workout during his 25-year screen career.

Trivia: A former dentist, Robert Dudley began appearing in small supporting roles on screen around 1917 (he played a clerk in the first screen version of the mystery-comedy Seven Keys to Baldpate) and would appear in literally hundreds of films until his retirement in 1951. Often cast as jurors, shopkeepers, ticket agents, and court clerks, the typical Dudley character displayed a very short fuse. Of all his often miniscule performances, one in particular stands out: the apartment-hunting "Wienie King" in Preston Sturges' hilarious The Palm Beach Story (1942).

Trivia: The son of actors Lon Chaney and Cleva Creighton, Creighton Tull Chaney was raised in an atmosphere of Spartan strictness by his father. He refused to allow Creighton to enter show business, wanting his son to prepare for a more "practical" profession; so young Chaney trained to be plumber, and worked a variety of relatively menial jobs despite his father's fame. After Lon Sr. died in 1930, Creighton entered movies with an RKO contract, but nothing much happened until, by his own recollection, he was "starved" into changing his name to Lon Chaney Jr. He would spend the rest of his life competing with his father's reputation as The Man With a Thousand Faces, hoping against hope to someday top Lon Sr. professionally. Unfortunately, he would have little opportunity to do this in the poverty-row quickie films that were his lot in the '30s, nor was his tenure (1937-1940) as a 20th Century Fox contract player artistically satisfying. Hoping to convince producers that he was a fine actor in his own right, Chaney appeared as the mentally retarded giant Lennie in a Los Angeles stage production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This led to his being cast as Lennie in the 1939 film version -- which turned out to be a mixed blessing. His reviews were excellent, but the character typed him in the eyes of many, forcing him to play variations of it for the next 30 years (which was most amusingly in the 1947 Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Brunette). In 1939, Chaney was signed by Universal Pictures, for which his father had once appeared in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925); Universal was launching a new cycle of horror films, and hoped to cash in on the Chaney name. Billing Lon Jr. as "the screen's master character actor," Universal cast him as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man in Man Made Monster (1941), a role originally intended for Boris Karloff. That same year, Chaney starred as the unfortunate lycanthrope Lawrence Talbot in The Wolf Man, the highlight of which was a transformation sequence deliberately evoking memories of his father's makeup expertise. (Unfortunately, union rules were such than Lon Jr. was not permitted to apply his own makeup). Universal would recast Chaney as the Wolf Man in four subsequent films, and cast him as the Frankenstein Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and the title role in Son of Dracula (1943). Chaney also headlined two B-horror series, one based upon radio's Inner Sanctum anthology, and the other a spin-off from the 1932 film The Mummy. Chaney occasionally got a worthwhile role in the '50s, notably in the films of producer/director Stanley Kramer (High Noon, Not As a Stranger, and especially The Defiant Ones), and he co-starred in the popular TV series Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans. For the most part, however, the actor's last two decades as a performer were distinguished by a steady stream of cheap, threadbare horror films, reaching a nadir with such fare as Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967). In the late '60s, Chaney fell victim to the same throat cancer that had killed his father, although publicly he tried to pass this affliction off as an acute case of laryngitis. Unable to speak at all in his last few months, he still grimly sought out film roles, ending his lengthy film career with Dracula vs. Frankenstein(1971). He died in 1973.